The current version of portage supports EAPI '2'. You must upgrade to a
newer version of portage before EAPI masked packages can be installed.

For more information, see the MASKED PACKAGES section in the emerge
man page or refer to the Gentoo Handbook.
(dependency required by "sys-apps/portage-2.1.11.9" [ebuild])
(dependency required by "portage" [argument])

Get python and portage from the tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org to suit your arch.
These are portage binary packages intended for use by

Code:

emerge -K <package>

You can't do that, so treat them as mini stage3 files and use

Code:

tar xpf <file> -C /

Ignore the extra garbage at end warning.

You are at the beginning of a very painful but very educational experience.
A reinstall will be much faster as you will have to pass through some of the intermediate stages the everyone else took in their stride.
e.g. glibc and gcc mutual blocks ... expat and others.

There are several threads on the forums that can help you out._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

If I'm reading the ebuild right, and I like to think that I am, python:2.6 requires EAPI 2, and portage-2.1.11.9 requires either python:2.7 with threads or python:2.6 with threads and ssl. portage-2.1.11.9 supports EAPI 3, so once you get that you're golden.

You shouldn't need to muck around with manually masking packages, just specify the versions exactly.

yeah, but he'll have a lot more pain than you did. His is 4 years out of date. He'll probably have some kernel blocker too.

Januszzz There is one system package that won't work with older kernels. I don't recall which. Check out the sticky post in this forum about it. You will likely find it helpful._________________Brian
Porthole, the Portage GUI frontend irc@freenode: #gentoo-guis, #porthole, Blog
layman, gentoolkit, CoreBuilder, esearch...

Also search Planet Gentoo for some posts regarding upgrading old installations. There has been a post or two over the past few months._________________emerge --quiet redefined | E17 vids: I, II | Now using e from git | e18, e19, and kde4 sucks :-/

F*ck all that, just reinstall. Spend the time you'd spend tearing your hair out to get past all the crap that's happened in the last 4 years, on tweaking the new install instead.

Backup your /home if it's not a separate partition (why not? change that on new install) /etc and /var/lib/portage/world. Forget about any sort of keywords et al, as it's all from years ago. Don't blindly copy anything from old /etc into new /etc, just have it there as reference. Same with world file, til your machine is booting and running again (ie before X.) Then bring up X and your DE, and once that's working, start looking at installing the apps you like.

Also, it's /etc/portage/make.conf this time around.

If you must upgrade, then update will help you get past those blockers. /etc/warning still has the detail about how to get past the dev-libs/expat-2 upgrade, as well as libpng and others. (Use the git version.)

The installation happens to be an old openvz container installed by me, and it is posssible to clone it more-or-less (reinstall and move services). Anyway this *will* also be pain in the ass as the container was very carefully designed and has waay to many services, gotchas here and there, some custom scripts and php code, some software is unsupported.... yuck

Surprisingly, the host itself is fine. It seems someone was upgrading it blindly using Portage and allwent smoothly through those years. I wonder if he knew that it includes several containers (more zombies here!).

Again thank you very much, up until now I've moved some easier services from this sinking ship

!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy ">=dev-libs/libffi-3.0.11" have been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- dev-libs/libffi-3.0.11 (masked by: EAPI 4)

The current version of portage supports EAPI '2'. You must upgrade to a
newer version of portage before EAPI masked packages can be installed.

For more information, see the MASKED PACKAGES section in the emerge
man page or refer to the Gentoo Handbook.
(dependency required by "dev-lang/python-2.6.8" [ebuild])
(dependency required by "dev-lang/python:2.6" [argument])

I've decided to reinstall remotely, but its nice to know of course regards.

Just to close the subject: I've ended moving services, all went surprisingly fine - Postfix, Amavis, OpenLDAP, dovecot, mysql, postgres, bind, apache, webapps, ipsec, and many more didn't need so much tweaking. Especially Postfix didn't need any change All services' problems were correctly in logs, it took exactly 4 hours and one night to clean some minor things like php code throwing errors due to versions change.

What happened to the container? well, after all was set up on shiny new gentoo in container, I took maany packages from tinderbox and sucesfully upgraded the old machine. No kernel blockers (there were no kernel dependent packages), all services more or less were able to start. But to be sure I had to spin emerge -e world. All upgrades took two days compilation, so it was rather wise to start from the beginning, especially there is no bloat here and there.